Black schools, also referred to as "colored" schools, were racially segregated schools in the United States that originated after the American Civil War and Reconstruction era. The phenomenon began in the late 1860s during Reconstruction era when Southern states under biracial Republican governments created public schools for the formerly enslaved. They were typically segregated. After 1877, conservative whites took control across the South. They continued the black schools, but at a much lower funding rate than white schools.

History

After the Civil War, there were only a handful of schools open to blacks, such as the

African Free School The African Free School was a school for children of slaves and free people of color in New York City. It was founded by members of the New York Manumission Society, including Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, on November 2, 1787. Many of its alumni ...

in New York and the Abiel Smith School in Boston. Individuals and churches, especially the Quakers, sometimes provided instruction as well.

Catholics The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...

established black schools via black nuns, such as St. Frances Academy in

Baltimore Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic, and the 30th most populous city in the United States with a population of 585,708 in 2020. Baltimore was ...

(1828) and St. Mary's Academy in New Orleans (1867). The proposal to set up a "colored" college in New Haven, Connecticut produced a violent reaction, and the project was abandoned. Schools in which black and white children studied together were destroyed by mobs in Connecticut and New Hampshire. Few African Americans in the South received any education at all until after the Civil War. Slaves had been prohibited from being educated, and there was generally no public school system for white children, either. The planter elite paid for private education for its children. Legislatures of Republican freedmen and whites established public schools for the first time during the Reconstruction era. At the beginning of the Reconstruction era, teachers in integrated schools were predominantly white. Black educators and education leadership found that many of these white teachers "effectively convinced black students that they were inferior." This led to a distrust of the structure of public education at that time. Because of racism directed at Black students, public schools became segregated throughout the south during Reconstruction and until the 1950s. New Orleans was a partial exception: its schools were usually integrated during Reconstruction. After the white Democrats regained power in Southern states in the 1870s, during the next two decades they imposed Jim Crow laws mandating segregation. They disfranchised most blacks and many poor whites through

poll tax A poll tax, also known as head tax or capitation, is a tax levied as a fixed sum on every liable individual (typically every adult), without reference to income or resources. Head taxes were important sources of revenue for many governments fr ...

es and

literacy tests A literacy test assesses a person's literacy skills: their ability to read and write have been administered by various governments, particularly to immigrants. In the United States, between the 1850s and 1960s, literacy tests were administered t ...

. Services for black schools (and any black institution) routinely received far less financial support than white schools. In addition, the South was extremely poor for years in the aftermath of the war, its infrastructure destroyed, and dependent on an agricultural economy despite falling cotton prices. Into the 20th century, black schools had second-hand books and buildings (see Station One School), and teachers were paid less and had larger classes."Beginnings of black education"
, The Civil Rights Movement in Virginia. Virginia Historical Society. Retrieved 4/12/09. In

Washington, D.C. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, Na ...

, however, because public school teachers were federal employees,

African-American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ensla ...

and Caucasian teachers were paid the same. The Virginia Constitution of 1870 mandated a system of public education for the first time, but the newly established schools were operated on a segregated basis. In these early schools, which were mostly rural, as was characteristic of the South, classes were most often taught by a single teacher, who taught all subjects, ages, and grades. Chronic underfunding led to constantly over-populated schools, despite the relatively low percentage of African-American students in schools overall. In 1900, the average black school in Virginia had 37 percent more pupils in attendance than the average white school. This discrimination continued for several years, as demonstrated by the fact that in 1937–38, in Halifax County, Virginia, the total value of white school property was $561,262, contrasted to only $176,881 for the county's black schools. In the 1930s the

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is a civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909 as an interracial endeavor to advance justice for African Americans by a group including W. E.&n ...

(NAACP) launched a national campaign to achieve equal schools within the " separate but equal" framework of the

U.S. Supreme Court The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that involve a point o ...

's 1896 decision in ''

Plessy v. Ferguson ''Plessy v. Ferguson'', 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in which the Court ruled that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in qualit ...

''. White hostility towards this campaign kept black schools from necessary resources. According to ''Rethinking Schools'' magazine, "Over the first three decades of the 20th century, the funding gap between black and white schools in the South increasingly widened. NAACP studies of unequal expenditures in the mid-to-late 1920s found that Georgia spent $4.59 per year on each African-American child as opposed to $36.29 on each white child. A study by Doxey Wilkerson at the end of the 1930s found that only 19 percent of 14- to 17-year-old African Americans were enrolled in high school."Lowe, R
"The Strange History of School Desegregation"
''

Rethinking Schools Rethinking, reconsidering, or reconsideration, is the process of reviewing a decision or conclusion that has previously been made to determine whether the initial decision should be changed. Rethinking can occur immediately after a decision has ...

''. Volume 18, No. 3, Spring 2004. Retrieved 4/12/09. The NAACP won several victories with this campaign, particularly around salary equalization.

Rosenwald Schools

Julius Rosenwald Julius Rosenwald (August 12, 1862 – January 6, 1932) was an American businessman and philanthropist. He is best known as a part-owner and leader of Sears, Roebuck and Company, and for establishing the Rosenwald Fund, which donated millions in ...

was a U.S. clothier, manufacturer, business executive, and philanthropist. A part-owner and leader of

Sears, Roebuck, and Company Sears, Roebuck and Co. ( ), commonly known as Sears, is an American chain of department stores founded in 1892 by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck and reincorporated in 1906 by Richard Sears and Julius Rosenwald, with what began ...

, he was responsible for establishing the

Rosenwald Fund The Rosenwald Fund (also known as the Rosenwald Foundation, the Julius Rosenwald Fund, and the Julius Rosenwald Foundation) was established in 1917 by Julius Rosenwald and his family for "the well-being of mankind." Rosenwald became part-owner of S ...

. After meeting

Booker T. Washington Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856November 14, 1915) was an American educator, author, orator, and adviser to several presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African-American c ...

in 1911, Rosenwald created his fund to improve the education of southern blacks by building schools, mostly in rural areas. More than 5,300 were built in the South by the time of Rosenwald's death in 1932. He created a system requiring matching public funds and interracial community cooperation for the maintenance and operation of schools. Black communities essentially taxed themselves twice to raise money to support new schools, often donating land and labor to get them built. With increasing urbanization, Rosenwald schools in many rural areas were abandoned. Some have been converted into community centers and in more urban areas, maintained or renovated as schools. In modern times the National Trust for Historic Preservation has called Rosenwald Schools as worthy of preservation as "beacons of African American education". By 2009 many communities restored Rosenwald schools.

Citizenship Schools

Septima Clark Septima Poinsette Clark (May 3, 1898 – December 15, 1987) was an African American educator and civil rights activist. Clark developed the literacy and citizenship workshops that played an important role in the drive for voting rights and ...

was an American educator, civil rights activist, and the creator of citizenship schools in 1957. Clark's project initially developed from secret literacy courses she held for African American adults in the Deep South. Citizenship schools helped black southerners push for the right to vote, as well as create activists and leaders for the Civil Rights Movement, using a curriculum that instilled self-pride, cultural pride, literacy, and a sense of one's citizenship rights. The citizenship school project trained over 10,000 citizenship school teachers who led over 800 citizenship schools throughout the South that was responsible for registering approximately 700,000 African Americans to vote.

Freedom Schools

An activist of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1964, Charles Cobb, proposed that the organization sponsor a network of

Freedom Schools Freedom Schools were temporary, alternative, and free schools for African Americans mostly in the South. They were originally part of a nationwide effort during the Civil Rights Movement to organize African Americans to achieve social, political and ...

. Originally, Freedom Schools were organized to achieve social, political, and economic equality by teaching African American students to be social change agents for the Civil Rights Movement; Black educators and activists later utilized the schools to provide schooling in areas where black public schools were closed in reaction to the ''

Brown v. Board of Education ''Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka'', 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segrega ...

'' ruling. More than 40 of these free schools existed by the end of the summer in 1964 serving close to 3,000 students.

Desegregation

Public schools were technically desegregated in the United States in 1954 by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in ''Brown vs Board of Education''. Some schools, such as the

Baltimore Polytechnic Institute The Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, colloquially referred to as BPI, Poly, and The Institute, is a U.S. public high school founded in 1883. Established as an all-male manual trade / vocational school by the Baltimore City Council and the Baltim ...

, were forced into a limited form of desegregation before that; with the

Baltimore City Public School System Baltimore City Public Schools (BCPS), also referred to as Baltimore City Public School System (BCPSS) or City Schools, is a public school district in the city of Baltimore, state of Maryland, United States. It serves the youth of Baltimore Cit ...

voting to desegregate the prestigious

advanced placement Advanced Placement (AP) is a program in the United States and Canada created by the College Board which offers college-level curricula and examinations to high school students. American colleges and universities may grant placement and cours ...

program in 1952. However, many were still ''de facto'' segregated due to inequality in housing and patterns of racial segregation in neighborhoods. President

Dwight Eisenhower Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower (born David Dwight Eisenhower; ; October 14, 1890 – March 28, 1969) was an American military officer and statesman who served as the 34th president of the United States from 1953 to 1961. During World War II, ...

enforced the Supreme Court's decision by sending US Army troops to Little Rock, Arkansas to protect the " Little Rock Nine" students' entry to school in 1957, thus setting a precedent for the Executive Branch to enforce Supreme Court rulings related to racial integration. He was the first president since Reconstruction to send Federal troops into the South to protect the rights of African Americans.

Busing

In the 1971 ''

Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education ''Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education'', 402 U.S. 1 (1971), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case dealing with the busing of students to promote integration in public schools. The Court held that busing was an appropriate ...

'' ruling, the Supreme Court allowed the federal government to force mandatory busing on

Charlotte, North Carolina Charlotte ( ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of North Carolina. Located in the Piedmont region, it is the county seat of Mecklenburg County. The population was 874,579 at the 2020 census, making Charlotte the 16th-most populo ...

and other cities nationwide in order to affect student assignment based on race and to attempt to further integrate schools. This was meant to combat patterns of ''de facto'' segregation that had developed in northern as well as southern cities. The 1974 ''

Milliken v. Bradley ''Milliken v. Bradley'', 418 U.S. 717 (1974), was a significant United States Supreme Court case dealing with the planned desegregation busing of public school students across district lines among 53 school districts in metropolitan Detroit. It co ...

'' decision placed a limitation on ''Swann'' when the court ruled that students could only be bused across district lines when evidence existed of ''de jure'' segregation across multiple school districts. In the 1970s and 1980s, under federal court supervision, many school districts implemented mandatory busing plans within their districts. Busing was controversial because it took students out of their own neighborhoods and further away from their parents' supervision and support. Even young students sometimes had lengthy bus rides each day. Districts also experimented with creating incentives, for instance, the creation of magnet schools to attract different students voluntarily.

Re-segregation

According to the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, the desegregation of U.S. public schools peaked in 1988; since then, schools have become more segregated because of changes in demographic residential patterns with continuing growth in suburbs and new communities. Jonathan Kozol has found that as of 2005, the proportion of Black students at majority-white schools was at "a level lower than in any year since 1968." Changing population patterns, with dramatically increased growth in the South and

Southwest The points of the compass are a set of horizontal, radially arrayed compass directions (or azimuths) used in navigation and cartography. A compass rose is primarily composed of four cardinal directions—north, east, south, and west—each sepa ...

, decreases in old industrial cities, and much increased immigration of new ethnic groups, have altered school populations in many areas. Black school districts continue to try various programs to improve student and school performance, including magnet schools and special programs related to the economic standing of families. Omaha, Nebraska proposed incorporating some suburban districts within city limits to enlarge its school-system catchment area. It wanted to create a "one tax, one school" system that would also allow it to create magnet programs to increase diversity in now predominantly white schools. Ernest Chambers, a 34-year-serving African-American state senator from

North Omaha, Nebraska North Omaha is a community area in Omaha, Nebraska, in the United States. It is bordered by Cuming and Dodge Streets on the south, Interstate 680 on the north, North 72nd Street on the west and the Missouri River and Carter Lake, Iowa on the ...

, believed a different solution was needed. Some observers said that in practical terms, public schools in Omaha had been re-segregated since the end of busing in 1999. In 2006, Chambers offered an amendment to the Omaha school reform bill in the Nebraska State Legislature which would provide for creation of three school districts in Omaha according to current racial demographics: black, white and Hispanic, with local community control of each district. He believed this would give the African-American community the chance to control a district in which their children were the majority. Chambers’ amendment was controversial. Opponents to the measure described it as "state-sponsored segregation". The authors of a 2003 Harvard study on re-segregation believe current trends in the South of white teachers leaving predominantly black schools is an inevitable result of federal court decisions limiting former methods of civil rights-era protections, such as busing and affirmative action in school admissions. Teachers and principals cite other issues, such as economic and cultural barriers in schools with high rates of poverty, as well as teachers' choices to work closer to home or in higher-performing schools. In some areas black teachers are also leaving the profession, resulting in teacher shortages.Jonnson, P. (January 21, 2003
"White teachers flee black schools"
'' The Christian Science Monitor''. Retrieved 4/12/09.